Welcome to Genealogical Treasures! We want to help you find valuable genealogical records you are likely missing! Cemetery and funeral home records can give you details about the deceased, family members, life events and associations and more. Membership to Genealogical Treasures gives you access to the full records available here. 

 

Websites, such as “Find A Grave,” provide gravestone images, and connections to other family, but the cemetery and funeral home records for the deceased may hold far more information. Cemeteries and funeral homes have a file for each deceased with the funeral service and burial arrangements, dates, tombstone purchase and location, who paid for the service or grave marker, next of kin, last known address, cause of death, bio, perhaps the eulogy and more.  

 

Genealogical Treasures has digitalized thousands of such records, making them available here on our site for you to make new valuable discoveries about your ancestors.    As cemetery managers in Des Moines, IA, we are aware of the many records and procedures recorded for the deceased and the great value of that information in family research.   

 

We have uploaded many databases for your to research over the past year and the collection and digitalizing of many more is ongoing. Genealogical Treasures currently offers members many Iowa cemeteries and funeral home records, some outside the state too. More and more to be added! Please check back often to see what’s new. 

 

As an added and very important feature, this site contains descriptions, when available, of the Cemeteries and Funeral Homes in the databases. This is also pertinent and informative detail important to your search as they contain information about ownership of the home through time, possibly specialization (such as catering to a special population group), and changes in name of the funeral home. 

 

Why do I need a Funeral Home Record?  When we are teaching classes, this comes up a lot.  Remember this, it is not always the same family member giving the information to each place.  Even if it is the same family member, they may not give the same information to the other place.  There may be one sibling giving information to a cemetery, another sibling giving information to the funeral home, even a third sibling giving the information for an obituary. All three may know the same information, but because of the stress they are under, they may not all give the same answers.  This is why all these documents are important to locate.  

 

Click below to look at a Funeral Home Family Tree.  What this is, is showing the life of funeral homes in the Des Moines area.  Who owned the funeral before the present owner, who merged with who, who split and created their own and who joined together.  This is a nice little tree to show where to look for the record you need.  Try to create one for your region.

 

There is a lot to learn about cemeteries.  No two cemeteries are alike in the sense of what information they collect.  We have started running our first cemetery in the summer of 2016.  Prior to this we have been involved with them for years.  We were part of the Des Moines Citizen Cemetery Advisory Committee for 6 years. We have helped map cemeteries, raise and clean headstone and mausoleum.  One of the things that are difficult when talking with the cemeteries is the terminology.  

 

A great example of this is the term for a grave.  A grave can be called a grave, space, lot or plot.  We have seen the term plot used to describe 1 – 3 grave, lots describe 2 – 6 graves, but we have seen that as high as 16 and as low as 1. A space can be the space enough for one grave or multiple graves. You see how confusing this can be.  A complete description could be, a plot in a lot in a section in a block in a garden, but some of these terms can be turned around.  Learning this terminology when talking to a cemetery can help a lot.